Detention

Detention is an indie survival horror game about a kid stuck inside a school building in 1960's Taiwan. Filtering its horrors through the eyes of a child and grounding it in real-world events, Detention tells an absolutely terrifying and deeply heartbreaking story that you shouldn't miss for anything in the world.

Pros

Cons

simple puzzles, no replay value

Bottom Line

Detention is an indie survival horror game about a kid stuck inside a school building in 1960's Taiwan. Filtering its horrors through the eyes of a child and grounding it in real-world events, Detention tells an absolutely terrifying and deeply heartbreaking story that you shouldn't miss for anything in the world.

March 4, 2018Vincent Peter

One of the best things about the games industry is how every once in a while, a tiny low-budget small-expectations indie game will come out of nowhere completely rock the foundations of the medium. Last month we got the wonderful twitch platformer Celeste that wowed us with it’s excellent gameplay and heartfelt story. Now, less than a month later, we have Detention, a 2D horror game that aims to be absolutely terrifying by grounding its supernatural horrors in real-world history.

Detention takes place in 1960’s Taiwan, with the nation under Martial Law. The game opens with a boy named Wei, as he falls asleep during class and wakes up to find the entire school deserted and warnings of an impending typhoon on the class board. After bumping into a senior girl named Ray, the two try to make their way out, but upon finding the only bridge off the premises collapsed, they decide to hunker down in the school building and wait out the storm. And then all hell breaks loose.

The beauty of Detention’s story is that it isn’t afraid to ‘get real’, so to speak, about the societal struggles of its setting. It constantly forces you to reconcile with the real horrors taking place at the time, while challenging its protagonist’s free will and incorporate those atrocities into the game’s themes. The fact that you’re witnessing the horror through the eyes of a child makes it all the more scary and just a little bit sad. You constantly see decisions made by the top brass circling back and robbing these children of their childhoods. The plot of Detention pulls no punches and aims straight for your gut every single time.

While the story is a complex, emotionally draining thing, the gameplay itself is fairly simple. It plays out across a 2D plane, and sees you navigate the school building and solve simple environmental puzzles. Items you pick up on your way are saved in your inventory and can be used to interact with other things using a simple interface that’s quite reminiscent of the early Silent Hill games. You also find notes, letters, and bits of graffiti - among other things - that flesh out the world, its characters, and their history, finding out more and more about how it was, living under martial law.

Every once in a while, you will be pursued by monsters. Known as Lingereds, these ghosts will take you down in two or three hits. The twist is that they can’t see you. There is no combat in Detention and the only way to avoid the Lingereds is to hold your breath and slowly move past them. You can only hold your breath for so long so the real tension of the game comes from timing your breathing to suit your needs. Sometimes, there’s no way past a Lingered and you’ll have to make a food offering so it has something else to scarf down while you make your escape.

The gameplay never gets particularly complex and barring a few of the late-game puzzles, you won’t find yourself stuck in any one spot for too long. It’s clear that the developers wanted to keep the pace smooth and not have the players lose sight of the narrative due to being stuck on obtuse adventure game puzzles. Every object you find has a specific purpose and you won’t have to venture too far to find that purpose. The monsters, while lethal, aren’t all that quick and fairly easy to avoid.

The main draw of Detention is its story and themes, and the game is relentlessly brilliant on that front. Instead of relying on frequent jumpscares (hey did you know Outlast is available on Switch now?) Detention builds a pervading feeling of dread with its atmosphere and the occasional graphic imagery, grotesque monster design, and a soundtrack that I don’t even know if I can describe as music. Of all the elements of this game, the soundtrack is what resembles Silent Hill the most. If a soundtrack’s job is to score the emotion of what’s happening on screen, then Detention knocks it out of the park.

This is all further augmented by a striking visual aesthetic. The art direction in Detention changes at the drop of a hat whenever it suits the mood. The environments are gorgeous watercolour paintings while the children look like hand-drawn paper cutouts, not unlike the sort I used to make as a kid, actually, while the enemies are heavily detailed and grotesque creations that don’t look like they belong, visually, within the game’s world.

With Layers of Fear: Legacy, Hollow and Outlast: Bundle of Terror, the Nintendo Switch seems to be gradually cultivating a library of great horror games. But with Detention, they have received an absolute classic of the genre. Filtering its horrors through real-world history viewed through the eyes of a child, Detention is as saddening as it is terrifying. Clocking in at just around three hours, Detention never outstays its welcome, and the striking visual aesthetic, creepy monsters, and spine-chilling soundtrack make this a must-have for Nintendo Switch owners.